Knowing which direction to take your business and how to get there requires a comprehensive and actionable marketing plan
Digital marketing trends come and go as each year passes. Being aware of them and planning to take advantage of them to give your business’s revenue a lift is useful, but concerning your strategic marketing plan, you need to take a broader view and consider both short- and long-term goals and methods.
Your marketing plan is a detailed roadmap your company will travel throughout the year. It should encompass everything including who your customers are, what your content marketing strategy is, the marketing and promotions budget you will adhere to, the campaigns and tactics you will deploy and more.
Seven Essential Steps to Strategic Marketing Planning
Every business is idiosyncratic and requires a clear marketing plan pertinent to its overall revenue goals and aims. Although there is no universal strategy your organization can adopt and follow, there are a series of established and sensible steps you can take to create an annual marketing plan that will suit your needs:
- Establish a Practical Promotional and Marketing Budget. Your budget will dictate what you will be able to achieve monthly, quarterly, and annually. Promoting and marketing events, products and services, and your company’s philosophy on doing business costs money. If your company’s marketing budget is modest, you will need to be creative, and allocate funds to the most important initiatives you will plan throughout the year.
- Revisit and Refresh Your Customer Personas. Customer or buyer personas are representations of your different customer segments, both real and desired. To get an accurate picture of who your customers are, you will need data derived from existing customer surveys and interviews, as well as other sources such as Google Analytics or Facebook Insights. Broadly defining your ideal customer personas will help your team understand who your customers are, what their needs are, and how your company can help them.
- Understand What Your Differentiators Are. What does your business do differently than all of your competitors? What is your unique selling proposition? What are your core values and your company’s key messages? Knowing what’s distinct about your company, its products and services, how they apply to your targeted customer persona segments as well as the messaging you will use for various media types will help you prepare a well-rounded content campaign or editorial calendar.
- Detail What Your Marketing Goals Are. What do you hope to achieve in the new year? Determining what your marketing goals are should go hand-in-hand with what your business’s overall goals are. Is that an increase in sales per quarter? Be realistic and ensure your goals are precise and well understood by everyone on your team.
- Evaluate Your Website and Marketing Collateral. Does your corporate website look outdated? Is it awkward to navigate? And is it a responsive website? What about all of your digital and printed marketing collateral? Make it an annual exercise to reassess all of your marketing channels and properties and ensure they are targeting the right audiences, and parlaying the right messages.
- Review Your Sales Strategy. Do you have a comprehensive and flexible sales strategy with achievable sales targets quarter-over-quarter? Or are you flying by the seat of your pants and making it up as you go? Although it is an important part of a holistic marketing strategy, your sales strategy should focus on increasing sales and meeting your quarterly revenue targets. It should include details about the customer’s journey both pre- and post-sale.
- Define Metrics to Measure Performance. You can’t determine success or failure or shift gears if need be without data that validates what worked and what didn’t. Once you’ve identified the key performance metrics you want to track, and the tools and methodologies you’ll use to measure your success, host regular meetings with your sales and marketing teams to decide if any changes are required and how to go about them.
Once you’ve reviewed how your company performed the previous year, and upon completing these steps above, you should be ready to craft a practical marketing strategy for the new year that will help your company meet its objectives.
Does your business need help defining its marketing plans and achieving the goals you want? Let us help. For more than 20 years we’ve been helping businesses of all sizes and in various industries grow their online presences and revenues.
How to set and split your marketing budget
The budget step above is where most plans stall. Every company and industry is different, but every business needs a marketing budget, whatever its size. Work through it in this order.
Start with last year’s numbers
Before you decide what to spend, pull together your financial and marketing data so you can:
- Spot the campaigns that missed and understand why.
- Use this year’s revenue to set a realistic target for next year.
- See which channels, such as social, content or SEO, are underperforming.
- Identify the parts of the business that need more attention and investment.
That review turns vague ambitions into specific needs, for example updating outdated website content, improving search rankings, designing material for an upcoming trade show or starting fresh with a new website.
Match your spend to your stage
- Brand new (under a year): budgets are usually tight. Focus on low-cost channels like organic social media, and learn to publish well yourself to keep costs down.
- Growing (one to five years): put a healthy share of revenue into building awareness, such as website improvements, a regular blog and sales material for events.
- Established (five years or more): invest steadily in brand marketing, including email, paid search and social or content campaigns. If you’re in a very competitive market, managing your reputation or launching something new, expect that budget to grow.
Decide where the money goes
- Branding and design: if you rely on brochures and trade show booths, or your logo and identity feel stale, start here. Everything else builds on it.
- SEO and paid search: if you need more quality leads and better visibility on Google, budget for ongoing SEO and pay-per-click advertising. SEO depends on good content, so plan for content improvements alongside it.
- Content marketing: content explains what your brand stands for, answers your customers’ questions, supports SEO and drives specific actions. The same work feeds your email campaigns.
- Social media: if recognition and customer conversation are the goal, shift more budget to social, including paid social to turn engagement into sales.
- Website: if your site is dated, hard to navigate or not doing its job, a rebuild may be the biggest single investment of the year, and it pulls design, content and SEO together.
- Seasonal peaks: if a large share of your sales lands in the holiday season or another busy period, set aside extra for those months: more campaigns, stronger paid search and the content and graphics to support them.
Turn the plan into a calendar
Start planning in the fall, not in January. Ask what worked this year, what didn’t and what will actually grow the business. Then list each activity with a target completion date and an owner. Writing down what is not in the plan is just as useful, because it stops the team from spending energy on ideas you have already ruled out.